Because of doubts about the status of paragraphs after World War II and the influence of readability formulas which emphasize sentence length and word length, technical writing teachers and texts have not been concerned very much with stylistic matters, especially at the paragraph level. However, recent research advances in the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and readability all redirect our attention to matters beyond the sentence in technical writing. A familiarity with such advances—including an understanding of cohesion elements, the “given-new contract,” and tagmemics—can enable technical writing instructors to improve student writing.
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